Saturday, 15 April 2017

In a few days' time The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl" will be fifteen years old. It wasn't their first single - not by a long chalk - but it was the first I remember seeing on television. You remember the video. It was made with Lego pieces. Stop-motion Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces, moving and stopping and moving and stopping. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon F-301, a 35mm SLR that was sold in the United States as the Nikon N2000, although nowadays everybody calls it the Nikon F-301, albeit that no-one calls it anything because no-one remembers it or cares about it.

The F-301 was released in 1985, the same year as Madonna's "Into the Groove". Nikon sold it alongside the F-501 / N2020, which was essentially the same camera but with an autofocus motor. Autofocus was a big thing back then, but there was still room in the market for manual focus cameras. In November 1985 Popular Photography had a look at the F-301 and concluded that it was okay, I guess, although the reviewer basically describes the camera without passing judgement.

Also, check out the headline font, which is a good example of a proportional font, e.g. the letter I in NIKON is much narrower than the letter O - but also check out how the letter O actually overlaps the letter K. I think the font is ITC Avant Garde Gothic, but I'm not an expert. Obviously they must have hired a designer to push the letters close together. I assume the headline font is an imitation of Nikon's N2000 logo, in which the zeros overlap, just like the Olympic rings, although the F-301/N2000 had nothing to do with the Olympics:

Flight of ideas is a mental disorder characteristic of mania. Nikon sold the F-301 as an entry-level beginner's camera, although compared to the later F-50 and F-70 it feels a lot more substantial. The top plate is apparently made of plastic but the chassis is however metal, and overall the F-301 is heavier and more solid than I expected. Benoît Pioulard's music is fantastic. He is an ambient-indie musician (technically Benoît Pioulard is a "project"; his real name is Thomas). His ambient music mostly sticks to the same formula of evolving, distorted drones, and it sounds lovely:

"Sonic sculpture" is a massive cliche, but in this case it's true, the music is like an object to be contemplated or a mood that slowly passes through you rather than a quick buzz. Until recently I assumed that this was the entirety of his bag, but he has also made jangly indie pop and even ambient folk. Last year he broke his wrist! Unfortunately this incurred hefty medical costs. If only he had flown across the Atlantic to the UK, where he could have had the surgery for free, except that they won't let you fly if you have a broken wrist, scotch that idea. I'd love a scotch egg right now.

Nowadays the F-301's design smells of the 1980s. In those days it was fashionable to ask Porsche Design or Giorgetto Giugiaro to have a go at designing camera bodies; the F-301 looks like something Porsche or Giugiaro might have produced although apparently it is an in-house design.

F-301s are available on eBay for pennies. They have no real antique value. As with the early Canon EOS cameras the body is slightly more upmarket than it appears. I bought one so I could try out my 28mm f/2.8 AI-S on a period-correct AI-S-enabled Nikon film camera, because why not?

With an AI 20mm f/3.5. As always the most important part of the photographic system is the man holding the camera (or woman), specifically me.

Spec-wise the F-301 resembles the Pentax A3, Canon T50 and so forth. It uses Nikon's AI lens mount and is one of only four Nikon SLRs that supported AI-S; it is manual focus only; it has DX film encoding and manual film advance, but not rewind; it has a non-standard PPhiAM exposure matrix, oddly without S; it takes four AAA batteries, or four AA batteries with an optional baseplate.

I have this baseplate, and with four Eneloops the F-301 lasts forever. Which is good, because it's useless without batteries. It doesn't have a backup mechanical shutter speed, but even if it did there would be no way to wind the film on. Unlike some motor-equipped cameras it shoots until it detects film tension, rather than stopping at exactly 36 frames, so a few of my rolls had 37 exposures. When you insert film it winds on with three quick shots.

The F-301 has a beeper that beeps if the shutter speed is too slow. You can turn it off. The beeper and the motor drive are very loud.

The camera was sold as an entry-level model, but it still has some of Nikon's professional heritage. You need to press a small button before you can twist the PASM dial; ditto rewind. The motor drive runs at an unusually fast 3.5fps.

Beyond the AA baseplate there were no special accessories. No handgrip, no dedicated speedlight (the F-501 had the SB-20), no underwater case etc.

The full caption is "black dudes, you can avoid the rain drops if you smoke".

So the story goes, during the making of The Fifth Element director Luc Besson came up with an imaginary alien language for Milla Jovovich's character, and by the end of filming the pair of them were so proficient in this language that they could have entire conversations. Humanity developed language for sound practical reasons, but to what extent does it shape our consciousness? Historically the F-301 was quickly overshadowed by Nikon's new autofocus cameras. In the 1990s and 2000s it was never prized by the cult camera crowd, who instead gravitated towards Nikon's older manual focus SLRs, such as the EM and F3 and so forth. On a technological level the F-301 is objectively more advanced than the F3, but the F3 has a much better viewfinder. The viewfinder is the F-301's biggest weakness. It feels cramped and I have to jam the camera against my face to see all of it.

My F-301 was actually broken when it arrived - the mirror and shutter were jammed - but after a bit of poking it started working again, so top marks to Nikon's early-1980s engineers. By the 1990s Nikon embraced cheapness to an alarming extent, and the F-301 was perhaps the last gasp of old-school grown-up Nikon.

If you want to experiment with film photography using old Nikon manual focus lenses the F-301 is an interesting value proposition - it can't depreciate any more, the only issue is liquidity - but you have to ask yourself if you'd rather fulfil a childhood dream and buy an F4 instead. The F-301, F-501, and FA do have one advantage over the F4 if you plan to use manual focus lenses however, in that they have a split-image viewfinder. Floordrobe, that's a good word.

Sunday, 9 April 2017

Let's have a look at the Vivitar 70-150mm f/3.8, an old zoom lens from the late 1970s that takes up very little space in a travel bag. Here's what it looks like:

The creatures we become / will visit distant suns / and find to their dismay / that they are all the same

The coating is an attractive red-purple-amber colour.

Vivitar sold it for all the popular camera mounts of the day. It pops up in camera magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s, often sold alongside a 2x teleconverter. Vivitar's adverts claimed that the teleconverter was a specially-formulated "matched multiplier" that worked best with the 70-150mm, but it sounds like total balls.

Off to Monte Isola on Lake Iseo, which has sunshine and cats (pictured).

In common with other Vivitar lenses the 70-150mm was built by a third party, in this case Kiron. To confuse matters Kiron sold the lens under its own name as a 70-150mm f/4, and furthermore Vivitar sold two different 70-150mm f/3.8 designs - the first had separate focus and zoom rings, my version has a one-touch pushy-pully-twisty control. Despite being roughly thirty years old the pushy-pully-twisty zoom ring on my model doesn't flop about.

It was a sunny day and I had the luxury of stopping down to f/8, which is easy on lenses. At f/8 the 70-150mm has very little vignetting and none of the "glow" typical of 1970s zooms. There's a bit of pincushion distortion at 150mm.The colours are fine, again without the obvious washed-out quality of 70s zooms, but hard to judge given that I was shooting expired Ektachrome, which had a purple cast, and furthermore atmospheric haze made everything look slightly blue. Which I compensated for in Photoshop, although in this case I think I amped up the colour a bit too much.

But was I blue? I was not blue because Lake Iseo is a happy place. This is a 100% crop from the middle, scanned at 2400dpi with an Epson V500. A dedicated film scanner could probably get more detail out of the original negative.

Short, relatively fast tele-zooms were a fad in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Zoom lenses had been around for a few decades but they really started to become popular in the 1970s. The typical 80-200mm f/4 lens of the day was however very bulky, and there was a gap in the market for shorter models that could replace an 80mm and 135mm portrait lens. The Olympus 70-150mm f/4 was an early example, launched as part of the OM range in 1974; by the end of the decade there were loads of third-party short zooms, which nowadays clutter up eBay. Nikon's relatively large 75-150mm f/3.5 Series E is quite fondly remembered.

Monte Isola is a fun day trip, or two-day stay if you want to catch the sunrise. The island itself is pedestrianised - the locals get about on scooters and Piaggio Apes - and although there isn't much to do beyond walk around and eat, what's wrong with that?

On the whole 70-150mm zooms fell between two stools, too slow for indoors and too short for the outdoors. If you want to photograph birds, cats, ducks and so forth - and I realise that ducks are birds, perhaps I could have said hedgehogs instead - you have to get right up close to fill the frame at 150mm, which is risky.

About a year later I got hold of a Kodak DCS 14n, a Nikon-mount, 14 megapixel full-frame camera from the early 2000s. Whilst trying it out I used this lens, and here are the test shots. Firstly in the middle at 150mm, f/3.8 and then f/8, no sharpening:

As you can see it goes from mediocre to okay. In the corners it is at least consistent, again at f/3.8 and then f/8:

If I take the last image and correct the CA and apply sharpening it's actually not bad:

I won't bore you with any shots at 70mm because it's basically the same; unspectacular wide open in the middle with lots of vignetting, decent at f.8. If I was giving the lens marks out of ten I would give it a couple of extra marks for being so small and handy.

The bokeh isn't particularly smooth although I have seen worse.

The range makes more sense for tigers, cows, horses, and people, for whom you can zoom in to 150mm for a head and shoulders portrait and zoom out to 70mm for an upper body shot.

This was shot with a 20mm. In the absence of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude organisation the only practical way to reach Monte Isola is by ferry.The island pictured in the poster (and at the top of this article) is the Isola di San Paolo, which is also accessible by ferry albeit that it's privately-owned. Google Street View has some images taken during the fortnight that The Floating Piers was in situ:

The inhabitants of Monte Isola string up the bodies of dead fish in these execution racks, facing the lake, "pour encourager les autres".

It seems that only Tamron made a short f/2.8 zoom, and it was a special soft focus model that sold in tiny quantities. With a 2x teleconverter the Vivitar 70-150mm becomes a 140-300mm f/8, which is very slow. My hunch is that unless it is an extraordinarily bright day, it would be better to ignore the teleconverter and just enlarge the photograph, or get closer, or put the camera away and just savour the moment.

70-150mm zooms don't have a direct modern equivalent; their heirs are image-stabilised, plastic-bodied 70-300mm f/4-5.6 designs, which have a more useful range but are much more conspicuous. It's funny the things that stick with you. For most of my adult life I have carried the words "beep cleep chimney" in my head. They come from this sketch, from Alas Smith and Jones:

Strictly speaking it was just "Smith and Jones" when they moved from BBC2 to BBC1.

A bunch of dinner party guests are playing charades. The joke is that instead of picking "vertical assembly building" or "Schleswig-Holstein question", their senile uncle has picked "beep cleep chimney", which doesn't make sense.

The sketch is cleverly constructed. There's an initial laugh at the realisation that the answer is beep cleep chimney, which sounds inherently funny; then there's a second laugh when we cut to the senile uncle, because (a) we suddenly realise why such an unlikely combination of words were picked and (b) Mel Smith looks stupid. The sketch is cruel and funny. All humour stems from violent subversion; the sketch subverts our expectations of charades, then dabbles in absurdism, which is yet another form of subversion.

The lens focuses closely enough to be used as a 1:4 macro. This is an Olympus Stylus Epic shot with a Fuji S5 at 150mm, f/11.

Alas Smith and Jones belongs to a generation of British television sketch shows that was supplanted if not exactly made obsolete by the dark realism of The Day Today and latterly the likes of Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look. Smith plays the senile uncle as a broadly comic village idiot, but a modern take on the same material would portray the character realistically, ending the sketch on a sour note. The humour would then derive from our discomfort at the fact we are laughing at a mentally ill old man. A similar idea was the basis of Mitchell and Webb's final sketch, in which a senile Sherlock Holmes tries to force coherent thoughts through the fog of dementia.

For British television sketch shows the 1980s was akin to the Bronze Age of American comics; although Russ Abbot and Cannon and Ball had huge ratings, the more sophisticated likes of Not the Nine O'Clock News, Alas Smith and Jones, Victoria Wood As Seen on TV, French and Saunders and so forth also attracted millions of viewers, bringing elements of the new Alternative Comedy to mainstream attention. The Vivitar 70-150mm f/3.8 is neat, albeit that the range is very short; the Nikon version is particularly handy if you have a posh Nikon body, because it mounts and meters natively; Alien: Isolation has one of the best soundtracks of any

Thursday, 6 April 2017

Every time I visit Venice I try to go somewhere I have never been before. This time I visited Torcello, which is a forty-minute ferry ride north of the main island, far past Murano, just next to Burano. Torcello itself has nothing much worth seeing, but it's a vivid reminder that Venice was once a marsh. Without human intervention most of Venice would look like this:

The world would be less jolly without Venice. Every time I go there I walk until my feet hurt, but I don't mind. On my deathbed I will not remember the pain, I will remember Venice.

On my way I read this article in the Daily Telegraph by Annabel Freyberg, published in May 2013. It was written about her grandfather, an officer in the New Zealand Army during the Second World War. In April 1945 he commanded the forces that liberated Venice from the Italians - the bad Italians.

I imagine he walked tall. The fascists pass; Venice remains.

Burano is small enough that every house has been photographed several times. This one is particularly popular. What do the residents get out of it?

On the surface the article is just a puff-piece advertisement for a luxury hotel, but it's well-written and has some evocative photographs of real men in fatigues enjoying the sun in Venice. I learn that Venice was "the very first city on both the German and Allied lists of places that must not be harmed", which is understandable given that it has been hundreds of years since Venice harmed anyone else. On a military level Venice would probably be easy to defend, but it would also be easy to blockade and bypass, and what would be the point fighting over it?

The fascists were fond of commissioning monuments to themselves, which they hoped would last for hundreds of years intact and thousands more years as imposing ruins. In reality they left behind piles of rubble, or skulls, or in Mussolini's case Milan Central train station and some ugly buildings in Rome. The beautiful ruins of Venice mock them and will outlast them.

There's another thing about Freyberg's article that stands out. She was dying when she wrote it and she knew it. Her 8-year-old daughter had died of cancer a year before, after a lengthy struggle against the disease. In a terrible coincidence Freyberg herself was diagnosed with mesothelioma almost immediately afterwards. Her trip to Venice wasn't just a puff piece; it was a last look at Eden. She died a few months later.

But what about Burano? The Venetian Empire collapsed a long time ago but left behind a beautiful husk, and the same is true of Burano. It was once a thriving town; then it was famous for lacemaking; now it is a colourful diversion. I've never really warmed to it. The buildings are pretty, but they're regularly repainted and so don't have the wrecked grandeur of Venice. I prefer Mazzorbo, which is just across a small bridge; there's nothing much to see but it feels like a real place rather than a three-dimensional postcard. The people who live there are very lucky. There is a school on Murano, and presumably the kids of the Venetian islands go to school every day by boat; they are lucky as well, or alternatively their parents were smart. Somewhere there is a Venetian-born millionaire with a healthy portfolio gliding back and forth between the islands on a small boat, not thinking of Slough.

You can't go back. Only forwards, even if you don't want to. We see it once and then never again.

All of the images in this post were shot with a Nikon F-301 film camera, using Fuji Superia print film, with the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S that appears in the previous post.

For comparison this was shot back in 2014 with a 1959 Olympus Pen using Fuji Velvia slide film, on a brighter day. That cat has a better life than you or I- like the dog in the windowsill in Bruges.

Sunday, 2 April 2017

Let's have a look at the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S, again. I wrote about it a couple of years ago, after using it on a modern digital camera, but I felt bad. The lens was launched in the film era, and it seemed wrong not to try it out on a film camera, so like all men who dream during the daytime I acted on my dream with open eyes to make it possible, and furthermore because I am committed to great writing I have decided to make this blog post an ambigram.

What's an ambigram? It's like a palindrome, but instead of reading the same backwards it reads differently backwards but still makes sense. The second half of this post is a science fiction story about a race of alien beings called the Nokin, who are engaged in a centuries-long war with a second race called the Aremac. The story is written in the language of the Aremac themselves (they are the goodies), so obviously it might be hard for you to understand it but humour me. Bear in mind that the character of S-IA has nothing to do with Sia, the musical lady.

The 28mm f/2.8 AI-S replaced Nikon's slightly older 28mm f/2.8 AI. The AI-S version had a more complicated optical design, with floating elements for superior close focus sharpness. It's a lovely little lens but hard to write about because it's effortlessly competent. It's sharp in the middle wide open, sharp all over at f/11, it focuses very closely, it's small and physically tough, it has a little bit of distortion, a tiny amount of CA, it doesn't vignette with a polarising filter, the focal length is wide but not so wide that it dominates every composition, f/2.8 it is fast enough to use in dim light if you have a steady hand, etc.

The lens has a tonne of internet cachet but in the actual real world it hasn't left much of a legacy. Photojournalists of the early 1980s wanted wider, or faster, or longer; furthermore the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S came after the heyday of stills photojournalism. The news images I grew up with were captured with videotape, not film. As I wandered through Burano, Torcello, and Milan I thought of the tourists who had gone before me, thirty years before, with a Nikon and a brand-new 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. Did it make them happy? Is it supposed to make you happy? Did it make me happy?

In practice I forgot all about the lens when I was taking pictures. In my experience the best photographic tools are transparent - you forget about them, they get out of the way - which again makes it hard to write about the 28mm. It was like a maid who cleans up and gets out of the way, or a personal assistant who manages your diary and doesn't ask for time off when her family are sick.

What was AI-S? It was a Nikon thing only of interest to Nikon nerds. Back in 1981 Nikon upgraded their lenses so that they would work properly with a new range of automatic, program-exposure cameras. They fiddled with the aperture system, added a dent in the back of the lens that told the camera to tune itself into the AI-S vibe, and added a ridge that told the camera if the lens was longer than 135mm.

AI-S lenses had a badly-drawn red circle painted on the lens mount (pictured). The few Nikon cameras that understood AI-S had a little pin with a badly-drawn red circle around it (also pictured).

AI-S lenses are sought after on the used market because they were the culmination of Nikon's manual focus lens range, or at least the last time that Nikon put significant effort into tweaking their manual focus lenses. Most AI-S lenses were optically the same as the AI models, in which case they're valuable simply because used examples are newer; some lenses, such as the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S, were overhauled. Nikon apparently continues to make a few AI-S lenses today, mainly for the film industry.

AI-S itself was a dead end. There were three smelborps. The first is that Nikon's program autoexposure system worked, and continued to work, with standard AI lenses, so AI-S felt like a solution in search of a problem. The second is that program exposure works best when the camera knows the focal length of the lens, so it can set higher shutter speeds with long telephotos. Nowadays this is done with CPU chips in the lenses and camera bodies, but AI-S tried to do it mechanically. Unfortunately there were only two ranges - "shorter than 135mm", and "everything else", and as a consequence AI-S cameras couldn't distinguish between a 135mm f/2.5 portrait lens and a 600mm f/4 telephoto (for example). AI-S cameras all had a "program (HI)" mode for longer lenses, but that wasn't fine-grained enough.

The biggest melborp was timing. AI-S was released too late for the Nikon F3/EM/FG generation, and within a few years the AF electronic autofocus system made it obsolete. The AI-S system's only "native" camera was the Nikon FA, an advanced amateur model that sold in relatively small numbers. The manual focus F-301, autofocus F-501, and professional F4 made use of AI-S in slightly different ways, but beyond those four cameras no other Nikons cared about it. The manual focus FM3a and FM10 of the 1990s reverted to the plain AI lens mount.

The F-301 was launched in 1985. Manual focus, motorised film advance, DX support. The plastic top plate was a harbinger of things to come, although the rest of it is metal. It feels a lot heavier than it looks.

What of the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S, though? For this post I stuck it onto a Nikon F-301, the lightest of the AI-S cameras and also the cheapest. It's made of metal and plastic and takes AAA batteries, or AA with an adapter. Mine was broken when I bought it! But I hit it and poked the mirror, at which point it started working again.